Coast Life Cycles

Music The Science of Oysters, the life cycle and environment of oysters in Franklin County. My name is Sandra Brooke and I'm a research faculty down here at the Marine Lab. And I first started working with oysters for my masters where I worked on the reproductive biology of the oyster larvae and then I moved into different topics and then I've now come back to the Marine Lab. I'm starting to work on oysters again from an aquaculture perspective and from an ecological perspective. The ideal environment for an oyster is in the middle of an estuary where you have fresh water coming down from the rivers and that means salt water coming in from the ocean. In the middle of that meeting is about perfecting the oysters. The greatest predator of the oysters in this area are the oyster drills which are a small snail. And as the name suggests they sit on top of the oyster and they drill into it and they cons And we can get up to 50% mortality of an oyster settlement from the oyster drills. They're a really serious problem and they cannot survive in low salinity. So these are one of the predators that's actually controlled by fresh water coming in. So oysters can live in a lot of different environments within these parameters, the salinity and the temperature that they can tolerate. But some environments are obviously bad with the covers and some environments give the flavor to the oysters that we prefer. For example, West Coast oysters, the California oysters are a little bit sweeter, whereas the East Coast oysters So that becomes a preference thing. But Appalachicola Bay is famous for its oysters because it has just the right combination of the type of food, the type of salinity or the salinity range. And it's just a perfect environment for growing the kinds of oysters that people Oysters have declined over the last few years for a n And so the fishermen are having a hard time with it. We don't want that fishing industry to go away. It's one of the most important in Appalachicola, which is primarily a fishing authority. And so what needs to happen is that we need the legislature, we need people to carry on focusing on this problem and not just walk away from it. And visitors to the area can support that philosophy by educating and looking at the visit places It's got a lovely district center. It talks about the local environment. And the more people understand and empathize with the beauty of the local environment, the more that makes people empowered or with the power to do things. The industry in 10 years, it really depends. I mean, if you have, if there is a foundation environmental problem You need to fix that problem before you can create a healthy ecosystem that will be safely harvested. And just reducing the harvest is not going to bring the population back until you solve that problem, whatever that problem might be. With oysters, it seems to be mostly water. There has been a worldwide decline in oyster populations. Some of the problems are the same across the board and some are specific to local areas. So, but it's not all dire. In this area, particularly, we're very lucky in that our watershed is not in the current back-up region. We don't have a lot of development. We do have a population on the coast, but we're nowhere near in the fat shape where some of the places are. So, I think there's hope. If we can change, if we can get a, if nature helps us out, then bring some of that fresh water back and the drought cycle changes. That will fundamentally change the system and it will be in pretty good shape. As far as managing is concerned, then maintenance of the watershed is the most important thing because what goes on upriver ends up downriver. And so, the good thing is that the management entities, the age of season in this area, are very concerned about managing the watershed and supporting the fishing population and supporting the health of the coast and environment. So, it's not all bad news and we're not starting from a really, really bad situation. So, I think there'still a chance that in 10 years we could have a viable recovery. This video is funded by a grant from Visit Florida and the Franklin County Tourist Development Council. Visit Florida.